Dr Shuja Shafi, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, told a London conference of head teachers that Muslims were happy to sign up to the teaching of values of fairness and tolerance saying that these were the “values of all of us” but said that the climate in which they had been published had led to many Muslims feeling their Britishness was under scrutiny.

Dr Shafi said: “This should not be a set of values achieved by some , the existing British population, which those who are not quite British enough must be civilised by.”

His comments came as Education Secretary Nicky Morgan said that tackling the threat of extremism in British schools was to be made a higher priority. In a statement to the House of Commons yesterday Ms Morgan said her department would extend the role of “counter extremism” in schools.

Education Secretary Nicky Morgan has said that tackling the threat of extremism in British schools is a high priority (Getty Images)
Dr Shafi also defended the schools at the centre of the Trojan Horse scandal in Birmingham saying that they had been high-achieving before they were damaged by the allegations.

“Failures in governance and procedures do no equate to a caliphatic takeover. In getting to the bottom of the Trojan Horse allegations we missed an opportunity for community cohesion. Instead for too many Muslims it was another episode where Muslims are supposed to question where they belong when in fact they are as British as anyone else.

“Children in these schools were achieving highly and had promising futures. The so called Trojan Horse allegations undermined that and effectively destroyed their confidence.”

Dr Shafi was speaking at the 100 Group conference, a meeting of state and private school head teachers organised by the independent Brighton College and Kingsford Community School, a state comprehensive in east London.

 

Richard Cairns, head of Brighton College, told the conference about a state school where Muslim boys turned their backs on girls dancing in a school performance and insisted that they needed to leave their classrooms in the middle of lessons in order to pray at set times.

But Dr Shafi shocked heads when he said that was acceptable as long as the pupils did not show disrespect saying “they need to make their feelings known”, but after repeated questioning conceded that: “they should adopt the rules of the school”.

Joan Deslandes, head of Kingsford Community School, said schools experienced problems when trying to teach about statutory subjects such as gay rights because some parents would either keep their children at home on that day or lodge time-consuming complaints.

She said: “If children are not turning up for lessons it can be very difficult. We are in loco parentis during the school day but then the child goes back to the parents and is being told to ignore what they are being told in the school day. It leads to a breakdown in order and discipline."

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By: Tiffany M. Reiss, PhD in Online Education

I have been teaching online courses for more than eight years now. I was one of the first at my previous institution to transition a face-to-face (F2F) course to a 100% online course and now, in addition to my F2F courses, I also teach for two fully online institutions. However, I still find many of my F2F colleagues reluctant to make that transition.

I realize that some courses do better lend themselves to being taught online. For example, I don’t teach biochemistry, but I can see where this might be a difficult class to transition to an online format; although I know some schools have done it. There are pros and cons to online courses, just like F2F courses, but for me, transitioning many of my courses online made me think in a different way about teaching and learning. Here’s why.

For one thing, the infrastructure of an online course is not the same as a F2F course so it does require different thinking around how best to design your course. In the traditional F2F course, the instructor typically stands in front of the class and professes. Many instructors have spent years accumulating knowledge and countless hours preparing and refining their lecture notes, and they feel it’s their job to lecture and the students’ job to take notes. To be sure, instructors can and do integrate active learning strategies into their classrooms but, by and large, the classroom dynamics haven’t changed all that much. In the F2F model, students are often passive consumers of information. They “consume” what the class —primarily the instructor—has to offer, memorize what they can, take a test, and be done with the information forever.

Online teaching is different. First, all those lecture notes the instructors have prepared over the years become useless. On a positive note, instructors can still use their PowerPoints as a teaching tool, and many of the same assignments can be adapted and applied. Second, what becomes more important is the ability to establish high-quality group discussions and manage them effectively in an asynchronous environment. This can be difficult because it forces the instructor to zero in on the heart of the course, and they have to ask, “What are the core pieces of information the students absolutely must understand and how do I create a question around it that can be discussed in depth?” The questions become vitally important. And isn’t that what learning is about? Aren’t the questions and the type of thinking they generate more important than the answers?

In the online environment, it becomes less about the instructor being the expert who professes and more about guiding the students in connecting what they are reading to the bigger picture. Now honestly, in doing this for my online courses, I became a better F2F instructor as well. Once I let go of “me” being the expert and thinking that “I” had to provide all of the relevant content and information, I began to see and trust that students can learn in a largely peer-based model with me guiding them through the process. I also was able to incorporate more and more of that type of learning into my F2F classes as well.

Now instead of the usual lecture-centric assignments and assessment model, I rely heavily on peer-based learning techniques and online assignments that force independent thinking and information gathering. My lectures have become shorter, more interactive, and less frequent. I find that students really like this approach, although some do struggle because they are accustomed to passively consuming the information as opposed to becoming active participants in their learning.

Still, overall, teaching online has made me a better F2F instructor because it forced me to think outside of my comfort zone — something I expect of students every day.

Dr. Tiffany M Reiss has more than 12 years in higher education as an instructor, scholar, leader and administrator.

Tags: teaching online courses, tips for online faculty

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